Turnover Reports

One percent turnover may cost you $500,000 to $1,000,000 (based on employee count, pay, training and replacement). This means, no matter what your cost levels are, knowing, controlling, accounting for and planning for turnover is a serious business element. When not planned for, any amount of turnover can be crippling; when planned for, turnover can be a positive boost for your company.

Compare current and prior period. In addition to longitudinal trending, compare periods. Consider and account for seasonality, which affects some of our business lines.

Share the report with leaders. Don’t keep these reports on a shelf. Educate your leaders so they know what the numbers mean. Use the numbers to identify opportunities for improvement, or to identify practices to replicate in other areas of the business.

Show details results by job, department, reason, manager, tenure, performance, recruiter, source, level of experience, and any other detail that is important to your business or service line. While some maintain that turnover reports are really good at the high level — which they are — also, please know and consider getting into as much detail as possible. As the cliche says, the devil is in the details. With turnover, it is. In part, this is because there are not a few simple factors that contribute to turnover, there are many, many factors, some of which can be masked and look alike, yet be very different. Go for the detail.

Dig into trending results to find areas for: improvement, cost savings, retention, re-recruiting, training, process improvement… you can add all kinds of important findings to this list. Focus on those which have a high priority for your business line or market sector.

Also, know that managing strictly by the numbers with turnover data can be a mistake. Turnover is not driven by singular events, or single factors. It is a driven by multiple factors. Turnover, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. It is agnostic. The reasons for turnover are where you want to look. If you avoid seeing turnover this way, you are missing out. For example, I want low performers to turnover; I want high performers to stay. However, if I have many high performers and I either can’t or don’t pay them for high performance or provide promotional opportunities, then I should expect turnover among my high performers. Again, this is neither good nor bad. It depends on what I want or need from a strategic management perspective.